Brahms Symphony No. 2 LIVE w/ The Aalborg Symphony
Brahms spent much of his adult life battling with his ambition to write the next great symphony and his terror at the shadow of Beethoven standing behind him. Brahms tortured himself for 14 years with his first symphony, and only published it when he was 49 years old. But when th ...Show more
Zemlinsky: The Mermaid
The story of Alexander von Zemlinsky's The Mermaid begins with a passionate love affair and ends in heartbreak of the most unabashedly big-R Romantic kind. In 1900, the young, fabulously talented, and famously beautiful Alma Schindler came to Zemlinsky's home to study composition ...Show more
Synopsis On today’s date in 1893, French composer Lili Boulanger was born in Paris. In 1913, when she was 20, Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata Faust and Helen, an achievement which was headline news in those days. Her father, Er ...Show more
Synopsis The hills surrounding the Austrian town of Salzburg, according to Rogers and Hammerstein, are “alive with the sound of music.” Well, the same could have been said for the vast interior and multiple choir lofts of Salzburg Cathedral on today’s date in 1682 when a lavish c ...Show more
Synopsis According to Wikipedia, an art song is “a vocal music composition, usually written for one voice with piano accompaniment … often a musical setting of an independent poem or text intended for the concert repertory as part of a recital.” The 600-plus art songs of the Vien ...Show more
Synopsis It might seem odd that during his long career, Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály wrote only nine works for orchestra. When someone asked him about this, he replied, “I was busy with more important work: I had to educate a public.” Kodály and his countryman Béla Bartók wer ...Show more